The significant impact of the Jikes RVM research community was recently recognized by ACM's Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) who awarded the 2012 SIGPLAN Software Award to Jikes RVM. Quoting from the award citation.

Jikes RVM was the first Java-in-Java virtual machine and contains many innovations, especially on adaptive optimization and memory management.

The high quality and modular design of Jikes has made it easy for researchers to develop, share, and compare advances in programming language implementation. The Jikes RVM core team has nurtured and supported a large community of researchers; this is witnessed by more than 200 papers, at least 40 dissertations, close to 25 courses, and research at almost 100 universities, that are based on the Jikes RVM.

The award names thirty two individuals who have made significant contributions to the project since it began in 1997. It also calls out the much larger set of code contributors and researchers who have made the Jikes RVM community possible with their energy and involvement. Congratulations and thank you to everyone who has been part of the Jikes RVM research community over the years!

We have been accepted in Google Summer of Code 2012 as a mentoring organization. See here for details. To that end, we are looking for project applications - see our ideas page. We have suggested both new and repeat proposals. It is part of the student's responsibilities to flesh out their own proposals, so don't hesitate to suggest crazy and/or sketchy ideas on the researchers mailing list.

We're happy to announce that Jikes RVM 3.1.2 has been released and is available for download. This release contains a number of enhancements and bug fixes contributed by the Jikes RVM community — Thanks!

This year we had four Summer of Code projects. We are very grateful to Google for their support and are pleased that all four students successfully passed. As part of the GSoC, Google also provided Jikes RVM with 4 x $500 which we will use to support the regression testing kit at ANU.

Jikes RVM has been accepted for the 2011 Google Summer of Code. Students will receive a stipend for working on code for 3 months between May and August. The period for students to apply is rapidly approaching so please spread the word.

I am very pleased to announce that Jikes RVM has been accepted for the 2010 Summer of Code. GSoC allows students to work closely with a mentor on a project of interest to Jikes RVM between 24 May and 20 August. Google will pay a stipend of $5000 to each accepted student developer. In the past, good things have come out of the GSoC and students have enjoyed the programme. You can find more details of the programme at gsoc2010.

If you are interested in participating in the GSoC, please start talking to a mentor now. The formal application period is 29 March - 9 April (both at 12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC). The complete timeline for the programme is here.

I'd be grateful if you could circulate this announcement to any student you think might be interested in making a contribution to Jikes RVM.

We are writing to introduce two new members to the Jikes RVM Steering Committee, announce some changes to the project organization, and highlight our performance results, which are now competitive with the products on the DaCapo Benchmarks.

Steering Committee

We have invited Richard Jones (U. Kent) and Kathryn McKinley (U. Texas) to join us on the Steering Committee. Both Kathryn and Richard have accepted our invitation. Kathryn and Richard been involved with the project since its inception. They both have a long track record of engagement with the project; directly and through the activities of their respective research groups. Their addition to the committee reflects our view that our stakeholders are researchers and that our mission is enabling research.

Project Organization

We have also made a minor change to the project structure, replacing the term "Core Team" with "Jikes RVM Team". We also extend team membership to anyone who has demonstrated a substantial commitment to the project through concrete contributions. Such contributions are not limited to code, but may include substantive contributions to the health of the project in any form. These changes are intended to emphasize the importance of researchers as the primary stakeholders in this project, and to make it explicit that the importance of a member's input is not measured in terms of the quantity or quality of changes to the code base.

We will also now encourage team members to follow a "12 month rule", whereby they are asked to reassess their team membership after a period of 12 months of inactivity

Performance

Due to the efforts of the Jikes RVM Team in adding features (such as native threads, Immix GC, and biased locking), and tuning the adaptive system, we have recently achieved really excellent performance results. While Jikes RVM still lags behind the products on the SPEC benchmarks (the products are highly tuned for SPEC), Jikes RVM attains within 5% of their performance on the DaCapo Benchmarks. Results are available here: http://jikesrvm.anu.edu.au/performance/2009-07/

These performance gains make Jikes RVM an even more appealing research platform and offer more evidence that Java can be an effective system implementation language.

We hope that these changes will bring new life to the project and re-affirm the project's original objectives of supporting the research community. Kathryn, Richard and the rest of the Jikes RVM Steering Committee welcome comments, suggestions and feedback from our community.

The default mature space collector has changed from Mark-Sweep to Immix.

Jikes RVM is now licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

The 3.1 release significantly improves over the performance of 3.0.1, with speedups of 10% and 21% on average for DaCapo and SPEC benchmarks respectively on an Intel C2Q. Highlights include a 29% improvement in jbb and a 32% improvement in jython.